Michael Ruse

THE DARWINIAN REVOLUTION

Science red in tooth and claw

Michael Ruse is, somewhat unusually, a professor of both philosophy and
zoology. In this book he looks at how evolutionary thought developed
between 1830 and 1875. The book was originally published in 1979; the
text has not been revised for the new edition but Ruse has included an
Afterword in which he looks at new research that has come out in the
intervening years. There has been an immense outpouring of publications
about Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution since his book first appeared
but it still merits an honourable place, both for its insights and for
its readability, enhanced by touches of humour. To some extent it covers
the same territory as Peter Bowler's Evolution: the history of an
idea, but its focus is narrower in time while providing more in-depth
discussion of the philosophical and religious ideas of Darwin's
contemporaries.

Ruse is particularly good on the personalities of those involved. They
were indeed a colourful bunch. They included William Whewell, Adam
Sedgwick, Baden Powell (father of the founder of the Scout movement),
John FW Herschel (son of the famous astronomer William Herschel),
Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, and Charles Babbage, better known for his
invention of the calculating engine, as well as Charles Darwin and
Thomas Henry Huxley. Many of these, especially those belonging to the
older generation, were clergymen; it was impossible to be a Fellow of a
college at Oxford or Cambridge at the time unless one was in Holy
Orders. This inevitably coloured their views on evolution, though not
always in the way one might expect.

Popular accounts of the debate about evolutionary thought in the
nineteenth century often convey the impression of a straightforward
conflict between secularism and religion, in which scientific secularism
emerged triumphant. As Ruse makes clear, this is a considerable
over-simplification: the relation between religion and science was in
fact very complex, and in some ways religion actually helped the cause
of science. Other factors, philosophical and social, were also involved,
and Ruse's claim is that all of these elements have to be given due
weight if the development of evolutionism is to be understood.

That profound changes in intellectual attitudes occurred in the
nineteenth century there can be no doubt. In 1844, when Robert Chambers
published his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, in
which he argued the case for organic evolution, hardly any serious
scientists accepted its main message, but when Charles Darwin published
The Origin in 1859 his main claim was quickly accepted by
almost all scientists concerned with the origin of organisms. In part,
this was a consequence of the difference in the scientific standing of
the two authors, but there were other reasons as well and it is these
that Ruse seeks to elucidate.

First, there were scientific reasons to accept evolution. It made sense
of the geographical distribution of species, such as finches and
tortoises on the Galapagos Islands, which Darwin described and which was
hard to explain on any other assumption. Also, by the 1860s more was
known about the fossil record than had been known in 1844, and it was
becoming increasingly difficult to doubt that progression had occurred
during geological time. Darwin was therefore able to draw on a more
ample arsenal of scientific facts; indeed, he had made significant
contributions to that arsenal himself.

Of course, Darwin was not merely advocating evolution as a process, he
put forward a mechanism by which it could occur. Chambers had not
provided a plausible cause for evolution, but Darwin did, with his
mechanism of natural selection. However, this idea had its problems:
estimates of the age of the earth seemed not to allow enough time for
evolution, and many people doubted if natural selection could be
powerful enough to produce new species as opposed to mere variations.
Even T.H.Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog", was relatively uninterested in
natural selection and tended to downplay its importance. But field
naturalists such as Henry Walter Bates found it invaluable as an
explanation for insect mimicry and his work was cited by Darwin in later
issues of The Origin.

The second area of change was in philosophy. Many of the older
scientists were idealists, Platonists, who favoured the view that
species were immutable Types. Huxley, on the other hand, was not a
Platonist and criticized his older colleagues on that ground. This
change was both a cause and a consequence of other changes, in religious
thought and in society at large, that were occurring at this time. Ruse
points to innovations in the educational system leading to a reduced
emphasis on the Classics and a weakening in the influence of religion.
Not surprisingly in view of his professional background, Ruse pays
considerable attention to the philosophical principles espoused by the
main participants in the debate. There was a prevailing assumption, to
which Darwin himself largely subscribed, that physics, and especially
astronomy, provided the explanatory model to which other sciences ought
to aspire.

The third class of change affected religion. Chambers had been attacked
on religious grounds: he was held to have threatened the special
position of man and to have left no room for God's design. Similar
criticisms were made of Darwin but less strongly. However, religion,
Ruse believes, also helped Darwinism. The argument from design prepared
people's minds for evolutionism, while thinkers such as Baden Powell
thought of God as working through unbroken natural laws rather than
through miracles.

In the 1830s and 1840s religion was a thorny problem for many people.
Partly this was a reaction to science; Ruse thinks that the attempt to
reconcile science and revelation was a particularly British
preoccupation (as perhaps it still is). And conventional religion was
also under threat from another source: German Biblical criticism. As a
result, some prominent clergymen, including Lyell, had moved a long way
towards Deism (natural as opposed to revealed religion).

Lyell is a particularly interesting figure in the present context. His
Principles of Geology accompanied Darwin on his voyage in the
Beagle and had a major influence on his thought. As a Deist, he was
unhappy about introducing miracles to explain the origin of species;
unlike Whewell, who thought it was compatible with science. Ruse sums
this up neatly by saying that Lyell wanted a world left alone by God, in
which organisms struggle for survival under the threat of extinction,
whereas Whewell wanted to see God hovering protectively over his
creation.

Fourthly, there were social and political influences. In the 1830s there
was a real fear that revolution might spread to Britain from abroad; by
1860 this was no longer the case. And in the second half of the century
it was possible for a man to become a professional scientist without
private means and without taking Holy Orders: a change that helped to
weaken the influence of religion.

It is difficult to describe all these developments without falling into
circularity, because each type of cause influenced, and was influenced
by, the others, but in a way this is precisely Ruse's point. He insists
that there were many different threads intertwining among themselves
and that it is misleading to oversimplify the argument by concentrating
on what appear to be the "real" issues. I think he makes a convincing
case for this claim. He finds no need to alter his views in this reissue
of the book, as he explains in the Afterword, though I was glad to see
that he softens his earlier criticism of Huxley, whom I have always
rather liked. I was even more glad to read that he strongly dissociates
himself from "social constructivism" in the history of science. He
states emphatically that "Charles Darwin was telling us real truths
about a real world". There is no question of organic evolution being a
human-created fiction.

Ruse is, however, rather despondent about the present position of
evolution studies as an academic discipline. He is concerned that
evolution is often seen to be "popular science" and is usually linked
with ecology, instead of being accorded the importance it deserves.
There is indeed a paradox here, which Ruse perhaps fails to bring out
fully. He mentions that in the USA today there are ten times as many
departments of molecular biology as of evolution, but he does not point
out that it is impossible to understand molecular biology adequately
unless it is seen in an evolutionary context. The interesting question,
therefore, is why this fact is not always recognized.

Much the same failure to take account of Darwinism exists within
medicine. The origins of many diseases can only be understood from an
evolutionary viewpoint (Charlton BG; Nesse RM, Williams GC). Immunology,
which is basic to modern medicine, is an evolutionary science through
and through (Tauber AI). And yet "Darwinian medicine" is hardly a dozen
years old; even today, few doctors are familiar with the term. There is
a sense in which the Darwinian revolution has still hardly begun.

See also

Bowler PJ. Evolution: the history of an idea. University of California
Press; revised edition, 1983, 1989.

Charlton BG. 'Senescence, cancer, and "endogenous parasites": a
salutogenic hypothesis'. Journal of the Royal College of Physicians,
1996;30:10-12